From the Historical Honeybee Articles site.
Floriferis ut apes In saltibus omnia libant

This is the third and final Special Notice, titled:

BEVAN ON THE BEE. — Second Notice.

Huron Reflector
Tuesday, May 09, 1843 Norwalk, Ohio

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From the national Intelligencer.

The Bee.

BEVAN ON THE BEE. — Second Notice.

In an introduction the author gives a
concise account of the rise and progress
of the study of this special branch of 
entomology, enumerating the authors who
have elucidated that matter the most,
and giving a view of the main ones on
natural history in general.

Without recurring to the wise King
of the Hebrews, who seems to have 
cultivated all the natural sciences, but of
whose particular labors in them we
know nothing, except from the account
given us by Josephus — who evidently
attributes to Solomon all the knowledge
current in his own day — it may be said
that Homer's Odyssey contains no small
body of natural history and of geography,
though both largely mixed with
the marvelous. So, too, of Herodotus's
Muses, which are half travel and half
history; describing, in every instance,
each country and all its wonders, as he
tells, the story of its public fortunes.

We collect from more fortunate writers,
whose works have not, like theirs,
perished, that Aristomachus, of Soli, (the
Athenian colony in Cilicia,) and Philiscus,
of Thasos, were the first to apply
themselves methodically to the observation
of the habits of the Bee. The former
of these philosophers is said to
have consumed no less than fifty-eight
years of his life in admiring and investigating
their manners and policy: the latter
spent so large a part of his time in
the woods and fields, contemplating
these industrious insects, that he received
the nickname of Agrius, (the rustic,)
a title which Aristaeus had borne before
him. The observations of both these
early apiarists must have formed an important
body of information to those who
next prosecuted the science, and no
doubt were the basis of the subsequent
labors of the learned Aristotle, the vast
range of whose thought embraced and
systematized all the knowledge of his
day. To him succeeded his pupil 
Theophrastus; after whom natural history
made little further progress among the
ancients.

If the zoological labors of Aristotle
have in general perished, except fragments,
we know at least that Fate has
made him compensation as to whatever
he had written of the Bee; for it was his
researches which Virgil, some three
hundred years later, embodied in the
most admirable of all poems on rural 
affairs. The fourth book of the Georgis
contains a history of the Bee much the
most charming ever written, and as correct
as could well be composed, until
the invention by Maraldi, in the beginning
of the eighteenth century, of the
glass hive, an aid without which observation
could go little further. But to
return: Columella and some of the other
Roman writers on rural economy, with
the encyclopedic Natural History of
Pliny, offer some little further research
as to the Bee; but have probably done
scarcely any thing but to copy Aristotle
and Theophrastus.

During the long interval of the middle
ages, when science of every sort lay
abandoned except by the Arabians, natural
history was forgotten save in the
single branch of chemistry; and it was
not till the time of Conrad Gesner's 
copious History of Insects (not published
till 1634, long after his death) that 
entomology began to take the form of a
science.

Later in the same century came Goedart,
who applied himself for some forty
years to the study; Swammerdam,
whose valuable "General History of Insects"
was first published in 1669; Maraldi,
who devoted much time to the
Bee; and Ray and Willoughby, whose
"Historia Insectorum" is full of important
observations, much assisted by the
use of powerful microscopes. To these
succeeded the exact and philosophic labors
of Reaumur, who greatly enlightened
natural history; Linnaaus, a still
more eminent name; and Bonnet, the able
and candid Swiss physiologist. Sehirach,
Hunter, and Huber bring down
the series of skillful elucidators of natural
history almost to our own day.  Besides
these, Dobbs, Knight, Sir C.S.
Mackenzie, Newport, Dunbar, and some
other Britons have illustrated, in a 
particular manner, the history of the Bee.
Thus far of the history of Bee writers.
We pass now with our author, to the
physiology of the insect itself.

Naturalists place it in the order 
hymenoptera and genus Apis. Of this genus,
many species have been enumerated.
Kirby has described no less than
two hundred and twenty sorts as natives
of England only.

Like the English monarchy, that of
our particular subject, the species known
as the domestic or honey Bee, embraces
three orders, not ill resembling king,
lords and commons.  The queen is not
only the acknowledged head and representative
of the nation, but its common
source of population, her ample loins
pouring out annually as many young as
are necessary to keep up the numbers
of the hive; which are rarely less than
twelve thousand, and rise to perhaps fifty
or sixty thousand where abundant
room is offered them. The lives of the
workers are now supposed not usually
to exceed three or four months, except
while in the torpid state. Thus the entire
population of the hive is probably
re-produced some three times in the
year: and we thus get something like a
measure of her queenship's prolific powers.

The drones or males are at once her
majesty's nobles and husbands, dividing
with her the administrative care of the
State, the official trusts, and the parental
functions. They are the office-holders
and politicians; having, in general, little
to do but to buz about royalty, pay their
court, eat the fat and the sweat of the
land, and talk politics.  Their number 
varies with the strength of the hive,
from fifteen hundred to two thousand.
They seem to be,  for nobles and husbands,
rather unwarlike; for they possess
no stings. On the whole, as they
neither fight nor work, but only make
love, they must have rather an easy time
of it. Still, as we do not choose to injure
any body's character, we feel bound
to say that, if they mix not in the ordinary
tasks of the operative Bees, it is the
fault of nature, and not theirs: for she has
furnished them with neither the sort of
trowel to the jaws, with which the workers
manage the wax, nor the baskets to
the legs, in which they collect their fragrant
spoil from the flowers. They labor
not, then, because they have higher
functions to perform, of a far loftier 
consequence to the public weal. And their
wise and just fellow-citizens, content
that each order in the State should discharge
its appropriate duty, murmur not,
nor stigmatize them as non-producers,
nor rail nor roar at them us aristocrats;
but recognize their utility in the peculiar
part which has been assigned them
of the public business, and submit with
cheerfulness to their exemption from inferior
tasks, inappropriate as well as impossible
to these general fathers of the
Bee people.

Last come they of the third sex, the
workers, formerly held to be neuters,
but now ascertained to be undeveloped
females; for the stimulant of a particular
diet seems capable of converting them
into breeding queens whenever there is 
a failure in the supply of royal personages.
They are smaller and plainer in
their persons than the rest: they have a
trunk, mandibles, and thighs of a peculiar
structure; and they are armed with
a straight sting, while that of the queen
is longer and curved. They are therefore
both the artisans and the soldiery of
the hive, replenishing it in peace and
defending it in war. Nor do they disdain
to stoop from these higher offices of
the citizen to humbler, but equally useful
ones; they mind the children, (as we
must call the young maggots,) supply
them, with pap, and do the other general
duties of dry-nursing; they stand sentry
at the mouth of the hive, form guards of
honor about the queen, and manage the
whole police of their busy little city.

In short Nature, as if to show that she
has prudence enough to do any thing,
and as if to give the lie to the only 
universal rule of politics in which we have
any faith, (namely, that females have no
business to meddle with government,)
appears to have taken pleasure in reversing,
through every part of this Amazonian
republic, whatever is safe every
where else, and yet calling out of the
flagrant solecism or anomaly an order
the most admirable and results the 
happiest. Here the females alone wear
weapons, while the males are timorous
and harmless. The softer sex is not only
braver but uglier than the rougher
one. Domi Militiaque (as the Romans say) 
at home and abroad, the ladies lord
it over the whole State, not only wearing
the breeches, but vindicating their
fitness for them by a masculine courage
and energy. None of the vices usually
said to attend a female reign are found
in this insect microcosm. Favorites,
the customary plague of a feeble dominion,
do not infest the hive, seizing upon
all public officers, and governing the
monarch, while they themselves are
governed by their lackeys. What is still
stranger, the commonwealth does not
appear to be one of tongues. There is
no chatter, no scolding. Of course there
is conversation; but it seems never to
rise above a gentle murmur, or, at most,
a hum of displeasure. But, upon the
whole, it is difficult to conceive a more
peaceful, resigned, and probably happy
state of hen-peckdom than that in which
the Bee husbands live.

Besides the ascertained functions that
we have mentioned, there are not wanting
other singular ones, which some of
the Bee students have imagined. Among
such we may place the idea which
some observers have entertained, that
the drones sit upon the eggs to hatch
them. Now though it has been said
that some of the Algerine bashaws compel
Christian captives who won't work
to do (invested in a sort of pair of feathery
unmentionables)  the duty of setting
hens,  and hatch chicks and ducklings, it
is incredible that in so mild and just a
community as that of the Bees any 
mortification yet crueler and more 
degrading than those we have described 
should be inflicted upon the masculine 
sex.

In addition to the characteristic difference
of the workers from the other Bees,
certain ones are seen, usually on the eve
of swarming, to bear upon the middle of
their frontlets a kind of light-colored 
top-knot, which seems to be formed of some
tenacious foreign substance. This, we
can hardly help concluding, must be a
mark of command which designates their
military leaders, or their architects. 
Individuals they certainly have who preside
over certain parts of their work,
and direct any of their deviations from
their usual mode of building which particular
circumstances may require; for
the Bee, let it be remarked, is far from
always pursuing the same plan of structure,
and often displays judgment and
invention in the manner in which he surmounts
a difficulty or repairs a mishap.

How the eggs are deposited, and their
progressive development into full grown
queens, drones, or workers, we
have not time to describe. For all these
things, involving many curious particulars,
we must refer to the first chapter of
our author.

Among the fanciful notions to which
the many singular facts of the bee-economy
have given rise, it is one that the
workers not only display a very affectionate
care of the young bees, as soon
as disengaged from the sealed-up cells
in which they are bred, but even give
them a course of preliminary instruction
in the active duties upon which they are
speedily to enter —in short, that they
have a system of free schools. Certainly,
in a state like theirs, where every
thing is in common, (for they are agrarians,
though monarchists,) there would
be no injustice in educating every body
at the public expense. The thing might
therefore be so, without any taking of
one man's property for another's benefit.
But Mr. Bevan discredits, from observation,
the whole notion; having continually
witnessed the total unconcern with
which the workers trample over the
heads of the young of their own class
who are breaking out of their nurseries.
On the other hand, he has remarked a
very manifest tenderness towards the
young drones; whom they aid in emerging
from their cells, and releasing themselves
from the swadling-clothes in
which nature wraps them; after which
they regale them with a little honey,
and then fall to cleaning out the empty
cell, to fit it for a new egg, or for the 
reception of honey.

When the larva or worm, which is
hatched from the egg, has grown to the
full capacity of the cell, the workers seal
it over with wax; and it then begins to
spin about itself cocoon. Enclosed in
this, its wings and legs develop themselves
and in a few days it is ready to
cut its way out, a perfect, though weak
and tender young bee. The queens,
however—of whom as many as seven
or eight are sometimes in progress at
once—form a cocoon which covers but
a part of their bodies, leaving them 
exposed to the sting of an adverse queen,
who may, by the right of primogeniture,
attain to royalty before them: in which
event, guided by instinct, or by that policy
which will
‘Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,'
the new princess never fails immediately,
as the first step towards securing her
throne, to seek and destroy every rival
pretender that her subjects will let her
at. This part of the bee-manners is
so curious, that we must extract the
passage of Bevan entire, the first paragraph
of which (it will be remarked) is
a citation from Huber:

'Such,' says Huber, 'is the instinctive comity 
of young queens to each other, that I have seen
one of them, immediately on its emergence from
the cell, rush to those of its sisters, and tear to
pieces even the imperfect larva. Hitherto,' he
adds, 'philosophers have claimed our admiration
of Nature for her care in preserving and 
multiplying the species. But from those facts we
must now admire her precautions in exposing
certain individuals to a mortal hazard.'

'A curious circumstance occurs with respect
to the hatching of the queen bee. When the
pupa or nymph is about to change into the perfect
insect, the bees render the cover of the cell
thinner, by gnawing away part of the wax, scooping
it out in waved circles at its edges; and with
so much nicety do they perform this operation,
that the cover at last becomes pellucid, owing to
its extreme thinness, thus facilitating the exit of
the fly. After the transformation is complete,
the young queens would, in common course,
immediately emerge from their cells, as workers
and drones do; but the former generally keep
the royal infants prisoners for some days, 
supplying them in the mean time with honey for
food, a small hole being made in the cover of
each cell, through which the confined bee extends
its proboscis to receive it. The royal insects
continually utter, while thus imprisoned,
and whether imprisoned or not, a kind of song
called piping, the modulations of which are sufficiently
marked to make them readily distinguishable
from each other. They consist of several
monotonous notes in rapid succession, and
Huber supposed the working bees to ascertain,
by the loudness of these tones, the ripeness of
their queens.

'Probably the young queens are thus temporarily
imprisoned the more completely to ensure
success to them in their first efforts to fly, which
would seem to be an object of considerable importance:
in furtherance of this, they are provided
with capacious cells, which, by enabling
them to expand their wings before they emerge,
fit them for immediate flight; whereas the workers
and drones issue from their cells with folded
wings.

'It has been said that the queen is a good deal
harassed by the other bees upon her liberation,
which has been attributed to their endeavor to
compel her departure with a swarm as soon as
possible. It has also been said that her majesty
has the power of instantly putting a stop to this
occasional worrying by uttering a peculiar noise,
which has been called the 'voice of sovereignty.’
But these notions arc probably erroneous. With
respect to the first, it will, I think, be made apparent
hereafter that the queen is never harassed
by the bees on her liberation, except when she
attempts to tear open the cells of her rivals: and
as to the voice of sovereignty, I am not aware
that any apiarian of the present day has ever witnessed
an instance of its overawing effect. Mr.
Dunbar, though he has seen her majesty raising
her voice in the angry attitude described by Huber,
never had any evidence of its impressing the
bees with fear.   Bonner has also declared that he
never could observe in the queen any thing like
an exercise of sovereignty. Not withstanding
his want of evidence, however, among the generality
of modern apiarians, we have the positive
statement of Huber in favor of this vox regalis.
He declares that he has heard it on various occasions,
and witnessed the striking effect which it
has always produced. On one occasion, he observes,
that a queen, having escaped the vigilance
of her guards and sprung from the cell,
was, on her approach to the royal embryos, pulled,
bitten, and chased by the other bees. But
standing with her thorax against a comb and
crossing her wings upon her back, keeping them
motion, but not unfolding them, she emitted
a particular sound, when the bees became, as it
were, paralyzed, and remained motionless. Taking
advantage of this dread, she rushed to the
royal cells: but the sound having ceased as she
prepared to ascend, the guardians of the cells instantly
took courage and fairly drove her away,
This voice of sovereignty is described as a very
distinct kind of clicking, composed of many
notes in the same key, which follow each other
rapidly. Butler speaks of the voice of the queen,
and says that he has sometimes heard her raise
it to a high pitch, (sounding like the sharp note
of a flute,) but not as producing a paralyzing effect
upon the bees; on the contrary, he refers to
it as being uttered when she wishes the workers
to face an enemy, to 'fight for their prince, their
lives, and their goods.' When piping, prior to
the issue of an after-swarm, the bees that are
near her remain still, with a slight inclination of
their heads, but whether impressed by fear or not
seems doubtful.

'Whether the queen possesses the influential
power ascribed to her of overawing the workers
or not, it is universally allowed that there is a
considerable degree of stateliness and dignity in
all her movements—a stateliness which till very
lately was regarded as being upheld by the appointment
of d regular court of attendants to pay
her royal honors. Tills appears to have been
Dr. Evans's notion, as expressed in the following
lines:

‘But mark, of royal port and awful mien.
Where moves with measure’d pace the 
insect queen!’
Twelve chosen guards, with slow and solemn
gait,
Bond at her nod, and round her person wait.’


Mr. Dunbar's observations, however, as well
as those of Mr. Golding and myself, disprove
this opinion. The queen has no regular guard,
either when she traverses the combs or when
she is stationary. In either case, us we have
frequently observed, the working bees that happen
to be near her, for the most part, turn their
heads, towards her, after the manner of courtiers
in the presence of royally, and wherever she
moves clear the way to allow her to pass, or
rather get hastily out of her way, forming a circle
round hut never accompanying her. They
occasionally, during her progress, fawn upon
and caress her, touching her softly with their antenna.
As she moves onward, till the bees, thro’
which she successively passes, pay her the same
homage; those which in her track she leaves behind, 
close together, and resume their accustomed
labors. This sort of homage is only paid to
fertile queens; whilst they continue virgins, they
receive no distinctive marks of respect. This
fact was noticed by Huber, and it has several
times fallen under my own observation. A very
striking instance of it was remarked by Mr.
Dunbar at the close of one of his experiments.—
'So long,' says he, 'as the queen which survived
the rencounter with her rival remained a virgin,
not the slightest degree of respect or attention
was paid her by the bees; not one gave her food;
she was obliged, as often as she required it, to
help herself; and in crossing to the honey cells
for that purpose, she had to scramble, often will
difficulty, over the crowd, not an individual of
which got out of her way, or seemed to care
whether she fed or starved; but no sooner die
she become a mother than the scene was changed,'
and all testified towards her those affectionate
attentions which are uniformly exhibited to
ferule queens.

'Bees, when deprived of their queen, have the
power of selecting one or more worker-eggs, or
grubs, and convening them into queens, thus
showing that there is no inherent difference in
female ova. To effect this, each of the promoted
grubs has a royal cell or cradle formed for it,
by having three contiguous common cells thrown
into one; two of the three grubs that occupy
those cells are sacrificed, and the remaining one
is liberally fed with loyal jelly. This royal, jelly
is a pungent food prepared by the working
bees exclusively for the purpose of feeding such
of the larvae as are destined to become candidates
for the honors of royalty, whether it be their lot
to assume them or not. It is more stimulating
than the food of ordinary bees, has not that
mawkish taste, and is evidently acescent from
the first. The royal larva are supplied with it
rather profusely, and there is always some of it
left in the cell after the transformation.'

Best Wishes,
Joe Waggle
Historical Honeybee Articles
Floriferis ut apes In saltibus omnia libant
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/HistoricalHoneybeeArticles/

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